I stood on the patio for a while, thinking about all the things this place had meant to me for more than a century: happiness, security, efficiency, fantasy. All of it gone. It was time I left. Maybe back to space, find Zed and see if I could make her happy again. Anywhere but here. Once Dan was dead-God, it was sinking in finally-I could catch a ride down to the Cape for a launch.
"What's on your mind?" Dan asked from behind me, startling me. He was in his boxers, thin and rangy and hairy.
"Thinking about moving on," I said.
He chuckled. "I've been thinking about doing the same," he said.
I smiled. "Not that way," I said. "Just going somewhere else, starting over. Getting away from this."
"Going to take the refresh?" he asked.
I looked away. "No," I said. "I don't believe I will."
"It may be none of my business," he said, "but why the fuck not? Jesus, Julius, what're you afraid of?"
"You don't want to know," I said.
"I'll be the judge of that."
"Let's have a drink, first," I said.
Dan rolled his eyes back for a second, then said, "All right, two Coronas, coming up."
After the room-service bot had left, we cracked the beers and pulled chairs out onto the porch.
"You sure you want to know this?" I asked.
He tipped his bottle at me. "Sure as shootin'," he said.
"I don't want refresh because it would mean losing the last year," I said.
He nodded. "By which you mean 'my last year,'" he said. "Right?"
I nodded and drank.
"I thought it might be like that. Julius, you are many things, but hard to figure out you are not. I have something to say that might help you make the decision. If you want to hear it, that is."
What could he have to say? "Sure," I said. "Sure." In my mind, I was on a shuttle headed for orbit, away from all of this.
"I had you killed," he said. "Debra asked me to, and I set it up. You were right all along."
The shuttle exploded in silent, slow moving space, and I spun away from it. I opened and shut my mouth.
It was Dan's turn to look away. "Debra proposed it. We were talking about the people I'd met when I was doing my missionary work, the stone crazies who I'd have to chase away after they'd rejoined the Bitchun Society. One of them, a girl from Cheyenne Mountain, she followed me down here, kept leaving me messages. I told Debra, and that's when she got the idea.
"I'd get the girl to shoot you and disappear. Debra would give me Whuffie-piles of it, and her team would follow suit. I'd be months closer to my goal. That was all I could think about back then, you remember."
"I remember." The smell of rejuve and desperation in our little cottage, and Dan plotting my death.
"We planned it, then Debra had herself refreshed from a backup-no memory of the event, just the Whuffie for me."
"Yes," I said. That would work. Plan a murder, kill yourself, have yourself refreshed from a backup made before the plan. How many times had Debra done terrible things and erased their memories that way?
"Yes," he agreed. "We did it, I'm ashamed to say. I can prove it, too-I have my backup, and I can get Jeanine to tell it, too." He drained his beer. "That's my plan. Tomorrow. I'll tell Lil and her folks, Kim and her people, the whole ad-hoc. A going-away present from a shitty friend."
My throat was dry and tight. I drank more beer. "You knew all along," I said. "You could have proved it at any time."
He nodded. "That's right."
"You let me …" I groped for the words. "You let me turn into …" They wouldn't come.
"I did," he said.
All this time. Lil and he, standing on
Chapter 10
I booked us ringside seats at the Polynesian Luau, riding high on a fresh round of sympathy Whuffie, and Dan and I drank a dozen lapu-lapus in hollowed-out pineapples before giving up on the idea of getting drunk.
Jeanine watched the fire-dances and the torch-lighting with eyes like saucers, and picked daintily at her spare ribs with one hand, never averting her attention from the floor show. When they danced the fast hula, her eyes jiggled. I chuckled.
From where we sat, I could see the spot where I'd waded into the Seven Seas Lagoon and breathed in the blood-temp water, I could see Cinderella's Castle, across the lagoon, I could see the monorails and the ferries and the busses making their busy way through the Park, shuttling teeming masses of guests from place to place. Dan toasted me with his pineapple and I toasted him back, drank it dry and belched in satisfaction.
Full belly, good friends, and the sunset behind a troupe of tawny, half-naked hula dancers. Who needs the Bitchun Society, anyway?
When it was over, we watched the fireworks from the beach, my toes dug into the clean white sand. Dan slipped his hand into my left hand, and Jeanine took my right. When the sky darkened and the lighted barges puttered away through the night, we three sat in the hammock.
I looked out over the Seven Seas Lagoon and realized that this was my last night, ever, in Walt Disney World. It was time to reboot again, start afresh. That's what the Park was for, only somehow, this visit, I'd gotten stuck. Dan had unstuck me.
The talk turned to Dan's impending death.
"So, tell me what you think of this," he said, hauling away on a glowing cigarette.
"Shoot," I said.
"I'm thinking-why take lethal injection? I mean, I may be done here for now, but why should I make an irreversible decision?"
"Why did you want to before?" I asked.
"Oh, it was the macho thing, I guess. The finality and all. But hell, I don't have to prove anything, right?"
"Sure," I said, magnanimously.
"So," he said, thoughtfully. "The question I'm asking is, how long can I deadhead for? There are folks who go down for a thousand years, ten thousand, right?"
"So, you're thinking, what, a million?" I joked.
He laughed. "A
not
The shuttle docked four hours later, but by the time we'd been through decontam and orientation, it was suppertime. Dan, nearly as Whuffie-poor as Debra after his confession, nevertheless treated us to a meal in the big bubble, squeeze-tubes of heady booze and steaky paste, and we watched the universe get colder for a while.
There were a couple guys jamming, tethered to a guitar and a set of tubs, and they weren't half bad.
Jeanine was uncomfortable hanging there naked. She'd gone to space with her folks after Dan had left the mountain, but it was in a long-haul generation ship. She'd abandoned it after a year or two and deadheaded back to Earth in a support-pod. She'd get used to life in space after a while. Or she wouldn't.
"Well," Dan said.
"Yup," I said, aping his laconic drawl. He smiled.
"It's that time," he said.
Spheres of saline tears formed in Jeanine's eyes, and I brushed them away, setting them adrift in the bubble. I'd developed some real tender, brother-sister type feelings for her since I'd watched her saucer-eye her way through the Magic Kingdom. No romance-not for me, thanks! But camaraderie and a sense of responsibility.
"See you in ten to the hundred," Dan said, and headed to the airlock. I started after him, but Jeanine caught my hand.
"He hates long good-byes," she said.
"I know," I said, and watched him go.
***
The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in redundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space or age or stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write out my life longhand, a letter to the me that I'll be when it's restored into a clone somewhere, somewhen. It's important that whoever I am then knows about this year, and it's going to take a lot of tries for me to get it right.
In the meantime, I'm working on another symphony, one with a little bit of "Grim Grinning Ghosts," and a nod to "It's a Small World After All," and especially "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow."
Jeanine says it's pretty good, but what does she know? She's barely fifty.
We've both got a lot of living to do before we know what's what.